November 16, 2000 | Read Time: 10 minutes
By GRANT WILLIAMS
Robert Egger says his organization’s approach to feeding the poor can be seen in the way the
D.C. Central Kitchen recently handled its first-ever direct-mail campaign.
The fund-raising company hired to do the mailing felt that the group “needed to make a straight-out appeal to people’s hearts,” Mr. Egger recalls. It urged the charitable organization to say, “There’s billions of tons of food wasted every year, millions of people are hungry every day, you should be outraged, help us recover surplus food to feed the hungry.”
But Mr. Egger, D.C. Central Kitchen’s founder and executive director, says that while he respects the fund-raising company’s work, he “despises everything about that kind of appeal.” He says the antihunger movement too often relies on pity-based fund-raising efforts. “But the public doesn’t believe it because they haven’t seen us actually do anything to change and shatter the stereotype that homeless people aren’t just waiting for a free turkey on Thanksgiving,” he says.
In the end, Mr. Egger worked out a compromise with the company: Half of the letters mailed out would be modeled on the consultant’s advice. The other half would be written by Mr. Egger.
In his version, Mr. Egger used an envelope that read: “Using Our Heads and Our Hearts.”
Instead of the words the consultant used on the donor-reply cards — “Food Waste. Hunger. Unemployment. Please Help!” — Mr. Egger’s reply cards said, “Empowerment, Recycling, Job Training, Join Our Team!”
Meeting Needs
As with most of the strategies Mr. Egger has pursued at his organization, his decision about the mailing appears to be paying off. “Right now we are getting the appeals back and more have responded to my approach,” he says. “The other one makes a good impact in the short term but doesn’t do anything to challenge people to meet the needs of the future.”
Mr. Egger, a former nightclub manager and music magazine editor, started D.C. Central Kitchen in 1989, using a $25,000 grant from the Charles S. Abel Foundation to start his organization and channel surplus food from President George Bush’s inaugural celebrations to hunger-relief charities in Washington.
Mr. Egger says the motivation for his work grew in part out of the frustration he felt as a church volunteer because many food programs at the time seemed to be operating inefficiently and didn’t try to fight the root causes of poverty.
Today, D.C. Central Kitchen collects about two tons of donated leftover food daily from Washington area restaurants, caterers, government agencies, hotels, and colleges and universities. It then combines and re-packages the food in its 10,000 square-foot facility into balanced meals, and distributes 3,000 portions to dozens of social-service agencies, including homeless and battered women’s shelters, drug clinics, and senior citizen centers.
Key to Mr. Egger’s successes is the way he has tried to relieve the burdens of local charities while knitting together nonprofit and for-profit ventures into a food-distribution service built on job training and placement for poor people.
D.C. Central Kitchen’s cooking is performed by welfare recipients and others, including people in detoxification programs and those released from prisons, who are enrolled in the kitchen’s 12-week culinary-arts training programs. These include a sanitation-management course designed by the National Restaurant Association.
At the first day of each training class, Mr. Egger tells students, “I’m not here to be your friend or your savior; this is pure business. You help me feed this city and I’ll get you a great job. Quid pro quo, baby, 50-50 all the way.”
But Mr. Egger say he also emphasizes the subtle benefits of the work. “I say, you’ll never meet her but somewhere out there you’ll help an old lady who is not going to have to choose between food and medicine.” He adds: “I want our trainees to realize they are making a big impact on others just by taking care of themselves.”
Running a Business
The charity helps its 100 graduates each year get jobs in the region’s food industry, and it provides counseling after they are hired to help them adjust to new work. In recent years, 91 percent of graduates have obtained work, including jobs at Hyatt Hotels and the Washington Hospital Center. Seventy-four percent of graduates are still employed six months after they are hired.
Mr. Egger has created a revenue-generating business within the kitchen to help finance additional programs and to offer employment opportunities for graduates of the culinary-arts training program. Fresh Start employs men and women who have graduated from the charity’s program to become cooks and bakers. Unlike the kitchen, the catering company uses purchased, rather than donated, food and it supplies and serves both nonprofit organizations and companies.
D.C. Central Kitchen also runs a program called First Helping, which operates out of a donated mobile kitchen to provide food to homeless people and steer them to help. The effort is a partnership with Clean and Sober Streets, the District of Columbia’s largest privately funded substance- and alcohol-abuse counseling service.
Other partnerships have included a program with Sodexho Marriott Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to use the D.C. Central Kitchen to feed lunch to the Washington children participating in the city’s summer-school programs. And Marriott, Pizza Hut, and Southland Corporation each worked with the kitchen to develop a “safe system” to distribute the companies’ surplus prepared foods.
Wedding Services
Mr. Egger even has plans to help create a wedding hall that will be catered by the Fresh Start company, and hopes to start a nonprofit nightclub, with a corporate sponsor, “where people could come in and enjoy entertainment while gently reflecting on how their money is helping train and feed people.”
D.C. Central Kitchen’s $1.4-million budget comes mostly from federal grants, corporate gifts, private money, including United Way funds, and income from Fresh Start. “We want a diversified revenue stream so we’re not at the whim of any one funder,” Mr. Egger says. The kitchen has not put a value on the donated food that it receives, nor has it counted it as revenue, because he says he doesn’t want to try to “use smoke and mirrors” to exaggerate the administrative efficiency of his organization.
The charity works hard to encourage volunteers “to get involved in and be a part of what we do,” including local high school students who sign up to fulfill community-service requirements at their schools. The kitchen attracted 7,500 volunteers last year. It also gets a hand from non-violent, first-time drug offenders referred by local courts to do community service at the kitchen in lieu of serving prison time.
Starting a Movement
Having had successes in Washington, Mr. Egger is now on a crusade to change the way nonprofit groups help hungry Americans elsewhere by giving hunger-relief advocates the tools to start similar programs. He has helped attract $1.5-million in foundation support for the kitchen movement. And last month, Mr. Egger’s organization unveiled a new Web site, called Kitchens INC (for In National Cooperation), which can be found at http://www.dccentralkitchen.org. The site includes free technical advice to other kitchens around the country, including an online training manual that explains how to raise start-up money, get donated food, and run a job-skills program.
The Web site also encourages online discussions among organizers of charity kitchens across the country. Mr. Egger is such a believer in the need for nonprofit groups to exchange information that he is offering a $1,000 prize each month, for the first 10 months, to the groups that participate most in the site’s activities.
The kitchen soon plans to transmit live images on its own Web site from two digital cameras installed at its facility. In addition to showing the group’s work in action, Mr. Egger eventually plans to use the cameras to teach online courses to other hunger-relief organizers.
The Web sites for Kitchens INC and D.C. Central Kitchen were developed with $250,000 in donated time and expertise from the New York-based Web design company Plural, Inc.
Mr. Egger says the Kitchen INC Web site was created as an alternative to starting an umbrella organization with paid employees and “layers of bureaucracy.”
Through the Web site, “anyone in the world can access the ideas, the curriculum, and the resources of dozens of complimentary programs,” says Mr. Egger. “People can leverage each other as resources, as well as pose questions and share lessons learned, thus greatly reducing the duplication of efforts or repetition of mistakes.”
About 30 kitchens around the country have registered with the Web site, he says, “and we expect a dramatic increase in the number in the next couple of years.”
Higher Stakes
Mr. Egger says the stakes for hunger-relief efforts are becoming increasingly high. Already, many nonprofit food banks and soup kitchens have been reporting increases in demand for food that they attribute to the 1996 changes to the federal welfare program. Mr. Egger says he expects such demand for social services to get even worse before it gets better, as former welfare recipients and aging baby boomers seek help.
But he worries that the charitable world is unprepared to respond.
“Typically what our movements do is wait until the problem becomes obvious and then panic and plead for money and resources,’’ says Mr. Egger. “It’s like we’re waiting for welfare reform to hit so we can point fingers. But these are real people out there who need help.”
Mr. Egger adds that as “the nonprofit movement has matured, we should be acting much more like businesses. And we should be working at full-tilt boogie night and day to engage the business community, the civic community, so that we can do the things we need to do.”
For example, Mr. Egger says that the antihunger movement still relies on a network of food pantries to serve people. “Yet the majority of people served are working people who can’t get to a pantry that’s open 9 to 5 Monday through Friday,” he says “That’s a barrier. By making people fit into our box, we are actually doing them a disservice.”
Mr. Egger says food charities should be asking: “As people make this Herculean effort from welfare to work, are we helping them?”
Mr. Egger, who describes himself as “a huckster, a seller, a marketer, a P.T. Barnum” for his cause, says he is intensely frustrated at charities that complain that Americans don’t give enough money to fight hunger.
“Rule No. 1 in business is never blame the customer, look at the product,” he says. “But we in the hunger movement never do that; we never critically review what we are doing.’’ He says charities tend to be too static, acting “as if we expect people to keep buying the car we built 15 years ago.”
Mr. Egger says charities can be bold and creative and still enjoy bipartisan support if they show results.
D.C. Central Kitchen collected a Point of Light award from the Bush Administration, and President Clinton has volunteered with the group the past two Christmases. Hillary Clinton also donated $5,000 to the group from her book royalties.
Mr. Egger says he works hard “to connect” with those on both sides of the political aisle.
Conservatives who visit his charity like his “self-help, put people-to-work” philosophy but don’t understand the real need for more government help with such programs as drug addiction, child care, and housing, says Mr. Egger.
Liberals, he says, too often see soup kitchens and pantries as a “one-dimensional romantic approach” and “are ready to go have protest rallies if they don’t get enough funding. But that only makes it easy for politicians and the public to say No.”
In the end, Mr. Egger believes that the “concept of the kitchen movement” bridges the gaps between nonprofits, business, and government. “All three have a role but it only works if we are all participating,” he says. “We must meet the real needs of real people, but in a way that shows them respect. Food shouldn’t be just food for the body but fuel for a national movement.”
